The Routledge Handbook of Law and Society, arriving March 4th, is co-edited by Mariana Valverde and Kamari Clarke (CrimSL), Eve Darian-Smith (University of California, Irvine) and Prabha Kotiswaran (King's College London). The following is an except from The Routledge Handbook of Law and Society: A new resource for teaching in these difficult times, published on the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) Blog.
"Eschewing conventional legal categories, the volume does not have entries on ‘family’, ‘property’, ‘contract’, and so on. Instead, legal processes are illuminated by adopting a more timely perspective that consistently features the role of movements in furthering social as well as legal justice. For example, the entry on ‘Ownership of intangibles’ by S. Ali Malik and Rosemary J. Coombe is not a typical intellectual property summary: it uses as its main empirical example the issue of corporate appropriation of Indigenous knowledges of plants.
"Similar innovation is visible, for example, in the entry on ‘corporations’, by South Asian historian Bhavani Raman, which focuses more on the European imperial corporations of the early modern period than on business law. And the entry on ‘Islam and the state’ by Anver Emon is also highly innovative: instead of ‘explaining’ Islamic law to common-law students, it shows, with evidence from Saudi Arabia and from the US and Canada, how Islam and ‘Islamic law’ are mobilized for opposing political purposes by different states. Another example is the entry on ‘migration’, written by Singapore socio-legal scholar Brenda Yeoh: it puts the Indian Ocean and the Pacific at the centre rather than treating them as footnotes to Atlantic-centred narratives."